What do you actually stand to lose if we teach that the founders were fallible and flawed individuals? Your ability to idolize mere men as supermen? I don’t get it, they were often quite literally the local aristocrats living at the top of the hill.

Why the impulse towards rote idolatry? It’s good to you to have a dearth of nuanced understanding? You can criticize the country and still love it, it’s willful simple-mindedness to say otherwise

I think so. We have glorified and deified people to the extent that we are unable to learn actual history about them. No historical figure should be off-limits to criticism, and I find it strange that so people are offended by criticism of people who aren’t alive, who they never met. So offended by reality and education.

Regardless, there’s a difference between people who owned slaves (kind of, anyway) and people who were willing to die themselves and leave the country over their right to continue a practice that was being made illegal worldwide, that was being heavily debated. By time the Civil War rolled around, abolitionism was a mainstream ethical movement and frankly, only really unethical people (or really rich people) were still promoting it and rounding up support for their cause by saying “the north wants to take away your rights.”

I mean maybe, if conservatives weren't constantly fighting against teaching children the actual racial history of these historical figures

Absolutely

George ripped enslaved people's teeth out of their mouth for his own dentures.

Thomas raped his enslaved people

individual issues, I'm sure we could fill books

ShOuLd We CoNdEmN aLl BaD pEoPlE?!

Let’s not pretend there are stark differences between these characters, primarily the fact that the founding fathers didn’t wage a war with the primary and singular intention of maintaining slavery, not only making them slavers, but traitors as well.

The founding fathers were slavers. This should be highlighted in their histories, the same as their positive achievements and impacts on our history.

Treat confederate icons like Hitler. Teach and condemn dont idolize

Stop conflating the removal of statues with removal from history books. This is the conservative line that by removing statues we are “deleting history”. This is a false equivalency. Statues like these are not history lessons, they are celebrations of historical figures. And no, we do not want to celebrate these individuals.

What about the erasure of Dwayne Camacho? Just because he plied his trade in the squared circle and parlayed his generational talent at the grunt and graps game into the presidency he's relegated to the dustbin of history.

There is a big difference. The confederates ONLY thing was enslaving blacks. Not like the founding fathers, for whom it was a blot on very positive records.